Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters

[eduardo@navasse.net]

Hello McKenzie and Empyreans,

I was waiting for others to move on the conversations, but given that
the author of the book has replied to the current thread, I would like
to comment on a couple of things that are brought up.  These follow
below. I hope others also decide to comment on what I will elaborate.

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters
> From: "McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com>
> Date: Fri, April 15, 2005 1:43 pm
> To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au

> 
> 1. I do not propose hackers as a new "universal class". Quite the contrary. 
> They are if anything a liminal class, always 'in between', a small class 
> with ambivalent interests. There is a reading of Lukacs in the book, but it 
> is not of the 'end of history' type. I think Aliette puts it well when she 
> says that hackers are "high slaves" or samurai. Which reminds me of what 
> friends say is happening in the anime industry in Japan, where the working 
> week just keeps getting longer and longer. This might be an example of what 
> happens when hackers -- producers of the new -- do not control their own 
> labor process.

I will focus on the issue of "universal class" with your second point
below.  Here I would ask how liminality works with the hacker; meaning,
how that inbetweeness actually relates to issues of marginality that are
brought up by the likes of Hardt and Negri in their book Empire. 
Specifically in their chapter "Symptoms of Passage," where they
critique postmodernism and post-colonialism.  The latter is reduced to
Bhabha who is scrutinized for not being able to move past notions of
constant nomadism and for finding a type of solidarity with those on
the periphery by constantly moving in-between the liminal space--the
"threshold," the "interstice," are the actual terms used by Bhabha, I
believe.  H &N explain that Bhabha's position is problematic because it
is defining itself in reactionary form to Bourgeois ideology:
postcolonialists, according to H & N, are pushing against "an open
door," since their resistance is well accepted within the system.  By
using Deleuze, I understand you may be able to renegotiate such
positions but such questions still remain "in between the lines" which
lead me to my second point below.

In relationship to this, I think of Aliette's Samurai example that you
agree with.  I wonder what kind of samurais are these if the samurai
lives under a very strict code to serve the master.  As we know,
samurais who dissented were called "ronin" and because they had no
master they lived in an actual liminal space--mainly because they were
supposed to kill themselves when their master died, or if they
dissented, or did not live up to the code.  It is of great importance
that they were considered outside the system--outsiders who had lost
their honor because they had not taken their own lives.  The point
being: if the person agrees to be a "samurai" that person would be
accepting to live up to the samurai code, and if such individuals
actually hacked the system, they would no longer be samurais.  In other
words, samurais--or the myth we are recycling here (may I add
exoticizing to some degree...)--appears to lead to living in a constant
space of proper behavior which if dissented  from leads to a state of
liminality not so different from H&N's criticism of Bhabha.    And
since you do mention an agreement to a "philosophy of history" I wonder
how such apparently liminal position relates to dialectics.

I would also add to that the Samurai example is rather male-centric,
which may also expose the phalocentrism that may be at play in between
the lines of current discourses, still.  This is something that
feminist theorists are obviously more adept to critique, I don't have
enough knowledge because my reading is not as strong in that area at
the moment.  But would such inbetweeness apply to the Hacker, after all
they are often thought of as "male" in terms of stereotypes in kitsch
culture.

> 
> 2. It really doesn't matter whether hackers are "diverse individuals" as 
> Eduardo puts it. All classes are made up of diverse individuals. All classes 
> are culturally diverse, and also increasingly diverse from the point of view 
> of the division of labor. Bourgeois thought makes a fetish of this 
> 'diversity'. What matters from a critical point of view is that private 
> property and the wage relation are forms of abstraction that makes these 
> differences irrelevant. It doesn't matter if you are a programmer or a 
> musician or a writer or a chemist. X amount of patents are worth Y amount of 
> copyrights. The market makes all kinds of hacking equivalent.

I agree with your explanation of diversity within classes, actually. 
And will have to reevaluate your writing with it in mind.  I just did
not see a clear hint towards this, so I will have to reflect on it.  I
will add that I did consider this specific point as we further
discussed your book on Empyre and I double checked on parts I thought
were key to such notion.  

However, I cannot contest this at the moment.

> 
> 3. It may well be that smart hackers (broadly defined) are figuring out how 
> to contribute to the gift economies of creative commons, free software, 
> listservers (etc) with an eye to reaping bankable value in the long run. 
> Nowhere do I ask of anyone that they do anything but consider their own self 
> interest. Mine is not a moral work. It's a political-economic one. If the 
> private vices of vanity and narcissism lead people to seek recognition in 
> gift economies which both reward that person while contributing to the 
> greater good, that's fine. The point is that gift economies now how powerful 
> abstract tools. Self interest can now work through the gift and produce the 
> commons as easily as through the commodity and the reproduction of private 
> property.

It appears to be difficult to separate morality from political economy
analysis.  This is like a structuralist trying to keep the signifier
and the signifed apart to understand the sign.  As Barthes and others
have explained, this is not so easy to do, hence why he ended up using
Kristeva's term "signifiance" to talk about the inbetweeness of
meaning.  That liminal space that you mention.

This, I believe, is crucial with the philosophy of history especially
because the type of political economy that you utilize is ultimately
dependent on Hegel's "Philosophy of History," which looks towards a
very specific dialectical development that for him culminated in the
Spirit/State--a collectivity of individuals working as one, which as we
all know Marx took and reinterpreted.  It is not clear how political
economy analysis founded on these ideas of progress does not indirectly
point towards dialectical change with traces of these two thinkers's
position on morality.  Is liminality really what is being proposed and
are people really being asked to evaluate their positions and just
that, or is there something expected out of such reflection more than
liminal repositionings?  Would a dialectic methodology imply some type
of "historical change" by default.  These are not rhetorical questions,
BTW.  I really do not know.

> 
> 4. However, what confronts us is a new class which seeks to control the 
> production process through turning once negotiable rights (patent, 
> copyright) into absolute private property rights (more along the lines of 
> trademark and trade secret). I was never happy with calling them 'resocrats' 
> in the French translation, precisely because it downplays the element of 
> ownership. What this new class owns is vectors -- the lines along which 
> information moves and is stored.

I am impartial to this.

> 
> 5. "Resistance is not enough". Here I agree entirely with Eduardo. My book 
> is not a theory that anticipates a practice. The practices are already 
> there, all around us. All I did was analyse what they have in common, as a 
> contribution to seeing beyond the fragmented world that appears before us as 
> 'spectacle' (if one still wants to speak in that language). BY all means 
> read Benjamin. The whol e of A Hacker Manifesto can be seen as flwoing out 
> of his 'theses on the philosophy of history' and 'the author as producer'. 
> But let's not fall into the tarpit of mysticism that has become Benjamin 
> studies...

Well, I am glad we agree on this.  Briefly, The issue with Benjamin I,
myself, reflected upon in a later post, proposing similar skepticism of
such "tarpit."


> 6. Of course, the whole book can be read as a fiction. Perhaps its a fiction 
> of action, or perhaps its about the action of fiction. It is not meant to be 
> sectarian or dogmatic. There one would hope to have learned something from 
> what Guattari calls the ''sad militants' of 68.

No problem with fiction.  it can sometimes lead to great states of
action.

Best,

Eduardo Navas